Jane Mayer revisited

Jane Mayer is the co-author of the New Yorker’s outrageous hit piece on Judge Kavanaugh. In this context readers may recall Mayer’s book (written with Jill Abramson) defaming Justice Thomas and supporting the Democrats’ late hit on him at the end of his confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1991. The Democrats sought to turn Justice Thomas into roadkill to prevent a black conservative from taking his place on the Court. The true victim of a ludicrous smear, Justice Thomas called out the Democrats’ 1991 playbook as “a high-tech lynching.” Now the Democrats seek to assassinate Judge Kavanaugh. We should have a #HeToo hashtag to denominate the victims of this form of leftist politics by other means.

Mayer’s work on Justice Thomas is the precursor and analogue of the current assassination frenzy. Yet another case involving Mayer illuminates the New Yorker’s hit on Judge Kavanaugh. In the late 1990’s, Mayer came to the aid of the Democratic maestro of sexual abuse and his angry Democrat allies. As the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal unfolded Mayer reported that Linda Tripp — remember her? — had a teenage run-in with the law 30 years prior to her involvement in the Lewinsky matter. Mayer’s ironically titled March 1998 New Yorker article (“Portrait of a whistleblower”) is posted online here (behind the New Yorker paywall).

Mayer and the Dems argued that Tripp committed a felony by failing to disclose on her Pentagon application an arrest in a case that got knocked down to loitering. Tripp sued Democratic operatives at the Pentagon for revealing the employment application on which she purportedly failed to disclose the arrest and won a $595,000 settlement. Jay Nordlinger told the story in the 2003 Weekly Standard article “Linda Tripp’s vindication.”

Mayer’s form of journalism is a handy vehicle for Democrats to trash the reputations of their opponents with the personal equivalent of ancient history or rumor, as the case may be. Mayer seems to be able to draw at will on the offerings of Democratic operatives. Both the Tripp and the Kavanaugh stories retail 30-year-old charges, but in the current case Mayer lacks anything like contemporaneous documentation supporting the allegations she has retailed against Judge Kavanaugh.